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May 29 - June 6, 2021
There might be a million ways to die in the West, but there are 2 million in the Alaskan backcountry.
Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.
“We ran out of things to talk about in three hours and had a whole day left.” It wasn’t until the 1920s, when radio was broadcast to the masses, that there was a full-time, brainless escape from boredom. Then came Big TV in the 1950s. Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it.
In fact, the reason the human body is built the way it is—with arched feet, long leg tendons, sweat glands, and more—is because we evolved to run down prey.
average American is now more likely to kill themselves than ever before. Evidence suggests that suicide didn’t happen throughout nearly all of human history. My high school graduating class of 400, for example, has lost anywhere from 1 to 3 people each year to overdoses or suicides since we earned our diplomas.
Levari discovered that humans can’t see black or white. We see gray. And the shade of gray we see depends on all of the other shades that came before it. We adjust expectations. As the threatening faces became rare, the study participants began to perceive neutral faces as threatening. When the unethical research proposals became less frequent, people began deeming ambiguous research proposals unethical.
“prevalence-induced concept change.” Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.
“Aren’t you cold?” “Oh, no. Not really. I get that it’s cold out,” said William. “But it doesn’t bother me. I kind of like how it feels. I can usually wear a T-shirt down to forty degrees.”
Roughly 60 percent of NBA players have come through P3 to uncover the perils and opportunities hidden within their movement patterns.
“Misogi is not about physical accomplishment,” said Parrish. “It asks, ‘What are you mentally and spiritually willing to put yourself through to be a better human?’ Misogis have allowed me to let go of fear and anxiousness, and you can see that in my work.”
“Endurance sports gave me some understanding of what it was to push to deeper levels and find new layers within myself,”
“the human brain hates this construct. The brain wants nothing to do with failure. Especially if you execute perfectly on your side.”
The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person. It’s an exploration and expansion of the edge of a person’s comfort zone.
Misogis are an emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenge that masquerades as a physical challenge.”
“Oh, we’ll be hungry,” Donnie told me. “But we’ll survive. I usually lose fifteen pounds every time I do a monthlong hunt.”
Learning improves myelination, a process that essentially gives our nervous system a V-8 engine, creating stronger, more efficient nerve signals throughout our brain and body.
Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that dementia significantly dropped in people who dedicated more of their lives to learning.
“the human brain feels uneasy and uncomfortable, and such unease and discomfort may translate into reduced subjective well-being.”
Savanna Theory of Happiness, and the general rule of thumb is, the higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be.
Building “the capacity to be alone” may be just as important for you as forging good relationships.
Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.
“The rules for surviving in the wild are shelter first, water second, food last,”
Alaska law stipulates that you can’t hunt on the same day you fly. It’s a perfect piece of legislation designed to prevent hunters from searching for animals while buzzing above the land in a Super Cub plane.
“Everyone worries about bears. But weather is the shit that’ll kill you.”
a study in the journal Global Change Biology, which discovered that only 5 percent of all of the earth’s land is unaltered by humans.
He’s particularly interested in the tie between screen time and our growing mental health issues. “I wouldn’t pin this on mobile technology one hundred percent,” said Brewer. “But I’d say it’s ninety percent due to it.”
“If given a choice, human brains are going to say, ‘Give me something that I can control or predict,’
In 2016, she led a study that found something as painless as a 20-minute stroll through a city park, like the one we’re in right now, can cause profound changes in the neurological structure of our brains. This leaves us feeling calmer and with sharper and more productive, creative minds. “But,” she said, “we found that people who used their cellphone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”
Fractals are organized chaos, which our brains apparently dig.
John Muir in 1901 put it this way: “Nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Other research shows antianxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences, and people who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed.
Yes, silence is more relaxing than most of the “relaxing” products marketers try to sell us.
Hunger, apparently, is the best sauce.
more than 70 percent of the country is overweight or obese—a figure that’s projected to be 86.2 percent by 2030—and
A team at the NIH recently found that for every two pounds a person loses, for example, their brain unconsciously ramps up their hunger and causes them to eat about 100 more calories. Had our bodies not developed these defense mechanisms, we likely wouldn’t have survived the crucible of evolution.
What I thought was a serving of peanut butter was actually three servings, or 600 calories. The “light lunch” I’d been eating for years delivered the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac and medium fries.
“When you learn how much a serving of peanut butter actually is,” said Kashey, “it is completely soul crushing.”
People eat 550 more calories—a whole extra meal—after nights where they sleep just five hours versus eight, according to research conducted at the Mayo Clinic.
The least filling food was croissants, while the most filling was plain white potatoes.
The key quality that made a food filling: how heavy its 240-calorie serving size was.
Dr. Atul Gawande notes that 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients in their final year of life.
Disney movies have led people to believe that nature is this harmonious place. It’s not. Nature can be brutal.”
A study funded by the UK’s Ministry of Defence discovered that people who engaged in a mentally demanding task while exercising increased their time to exhaustion a relative 300 percent more compared to a group who zoned out while doing the exact same 12-week exercise program.
If an early human had felt orgasmic pleasure through, say, carrying heavy rocks uphill, she would have quickly burned through all her energy stores and died.
Over three decades he’s shown that exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly a protective emotion. It’s a psychological state that has little to do with a person’s physical limits.
On a hot day a relatively fit human will beat every other mammal in a distance race—lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc.*1
Our most radical strength feats were muscling loads great distances over rough ground. Humans are, in fact, “extreme” in their ability to move items from point A to B, wrote researchers in a study in the journal PLOS One.
And the CDC found that people infected with Covid-19 who also suffered from preventable lifestyle diseases driven by a lack of fitness were six times more likely to be hospitalized.
Humans evolved doing physical work with friends, and sociality is deeply intertwined with effort. Being social while actively hunting and gathering improved our success and survival, according to research in Nature. Even today people are more likely to stick with more social exercise routines, says a study in Frontiers in Psychology.
In our pursuit of better living we’ve allowed comfort to calcify our natural movements and strengths. Without conscious discomfort and purposeful exercise—a forceful push against comfort creep—we’ll only continue to become weaker and sicker.
